Diverse Street Style Photos from PFW

During the Fall 2018 season of New York Fashion Week, we raised the issue of diversity in street style photos. Though well-dressed attendees of all races, sizes, and gender orientations attend Fashion Week, street style galleries are overwhelmingly white, thin and cisgendered. In fact, street style photographers snap the same few influencers so often that it's become more like a red carpet on the sidewalk than an organic celebration of style.

The downfall of street style is all the more disappointing when you consider how it originated. Street style was borne as a way to subvert the elitist nature of the fashion industry, highlighting everyday people with an imaginative approach to dressing and making fashion accessible to the masses. Now the same discriminatory practices that runway shows are criticized for have spilled out onto the street. And while countless articles are dedicated to the fight for inclusive model casts, street style discrimination mostly goes unnoticed.

Now that we're finally shining a light on these exclusionary tactics, people are playing the blame game. Attendees blame photographers, photographers blame editors, and some even argue that the only stylish people attending fashion shows just happen to be white and thin. To ascertain whether diverse street style galleries are as difficult to produce as some claim, we tapped Darrel Hunter, the famed photographer behind Mode Hunter, to fix his camera on an inclusive crop of Fashion Week show-goers. His response? "In past assignments, it has been the opposite challenge, trying to get more diversity included in the selection." At the close of Paris Fashion Week, after Darrel submitted his final street style photo, we found that shooting people who run the gamut in race, size, ethnicity and gender orientation is not only possible; it's easy.